A Project in Collaboration with Students from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main

The exhibition Dream Universe takes Yoko Ono's "Instruction Works" as a starting point. In this piece, which has been developing continually since the early 1960s, the participation of the viewer is necessary in order to realise the individual works, where questions about the nature of ephemera and the demystification of the art object rise to the foreground. In Yoko Ono's first exhibition of "Instruction Paintings and Drawings", which took place in 1961 in George Maciunas A G Gallery in New York City, she reduced her work to a simple concept

where the gallery visitors were invited to take part in the creative process and participate in the execution of the artwork.

In the last fifty years, Yoko Ono is one of the few women in the international context who have played a decisive role within the framework of experimental and avant-garde art. She has been associated with several different movements: Conceptual Art, Performances, Fluxus and Happenings. Her interdisciplinary practice breaks boundaries between traditional art disciplines. Rather than making the working process dependent on materials, mediums and methods, words serve as the basis for each concept - as description as well as definition - yet the performers always have substantial interpretative space. And with such procedures, she succeeds in making a split between artistic conception and its material form, while simultaneously underlining its subjective as well as ruminative qualities.

For Dream Universe, We have invited a group of students from the Städelschule to realise the "Instructions" that Yoko Ono has proposed as well as some that they have selected themselves.

Some examples of realised "Instructions" are:

Film No. 3 Toilet Thoughts

Prepare 365 copies of a poster and paste them in bar toilets around the city. Leave them for a week and take pictures of all 365 copies. Leave them again for a month and take pictures of them. Go on until you are satisfied or until the posters disappear. Make a film by stringing all the pictures together. 1968

Omnibus Film

1) Give a print of the same film to many directors.

2) Ask each one to re-edit the print.

3) Show all the versions together omnibus style. 1964 june

Sun Piece

Watch the sun until it becomes square. 1962 winter

The Presentation of the individual works will assume different forms and will change during the duration of the exhibition as the process entails. Works will be executed in the exhibition context, in public spaces and also in a publication that will be available at the end of the exhibition.